Party On, Garth

Garth Brooks has done nothing wrong. In fact, for a 30-year-old
country singer who's sold 27 million copies of five albums in under
four years, he's a paragon--humane, modest, hunky only by
association. Yet his constituency shows surprising limitations.
Most important, Brooks has yet to break pop--his albums dominate
the charts because the charts now reflect raw sales, but while his
numerous hit singles have made minor inroads in the dread adult
contemporary format, not one has gone top 40. Second, he's a
throwback to the premultinational age, a megastar who sells almost
exclusively in the U.S. of A. And last if also least, he's not what
you'd call hip.

It's a stretch to call this a surprise, I know. Country isn't
hip, pop isn't hip, so why should Garth Brooks be hip? Is being
famous for selling records that much different, not to mention
better, than being famous for being famous? After all, Brooks was
the first SoundScan celebrity--a known new-Nashville icon whose No
Fences shocked bizzers by leapfrogging over such long-running
phenoms as Wilson Phillips and C + C Music Factory the week
Billboard hooked its charts to real live cash registers in May
1991. By September, debuting at No. 1 the way the follow-up Ropin' the
Wind did was no big deal. N.W.A and Skid Row had been there and
gone, and sure enough, Guns N' Roses knocked him off the very next
week. But two weeks later Garth was back, and with annoying
interruptions from U2 and Michael Jackson and Nirvana, he topped
the chart till April. Country pockets were proving a lot deeper
than big-city marketeers had figured. As I write, Billy Ray Cyrus,
Brooks & Dunn, Vince Gill, and Wynonna Judd have albums in the top
20. And so, of course, does Garth--four of them, including a
Christmas collection he presciently released in August.

Yet because he's classified as a country artist--a pigeonhole
Garth encourages, since country stations can get nasty if they
decide you're selling them down the river--New Yorkers are more
likely to have read about him in the dentist's office than heard
him on the radio. So here in Hipville Garth finds himself a
nonentity among casual music-lovers and a symbol of spiritual
bankruptcy for tastemakers smart enough to know better and dumb
enough to consider Dwight Yoakam the real thing. The problem is,
artists rarely go quite this far through the roof--outselling
Michael Bolton two to one, say--just because people have bad taste.
Even if you buy the lie that honky tonk is the one true country
music, or claim like Dave Marsh that the country boom reflects a
cynical manipulation of antirap racism, the question remains: why
do benighted record buyers give Brooks more bucks than Billy Ray
Cyrus or Vince Gill?

The short answer is that Brooks isn't just a country artist.
Growing up in Oklahoma he preferred Dan Fogelberg and "Dust in the
Wind" to George Jones and "Ladies Love Outlaws," and as both singer
and songwriter, he definitely remains a softy. His weakness for
schlock emotion does indeed recall both Elton John and Billy Joel,
whose "Shameless" he claimed for Nashville on Ropin' the Wind. And
more than John or Joel, although less than Barry Manilow or Julio
Iglesias, he's a women's artist: where most male country singers are
content to wallow in their guilt, he actively identifies with
female complaints and concerns. At the Spectrum in Philadelphia
October 23, where there was no discernible male bonding and plenty
of out-with-the-girls, the biggest and highest-pitched cheer of the
night came on the video-only final verse of "The Thunder Rolls," in
which a wife murders her errant husband. Most of the female groups
seemed to be better halves (or divorcees) on a spree, but unless
fashions are different in Philadelphia, I also spied a few lesbian
couples. Garth's bass-playing big sister, Betsy Smittle, a major
stage presence in his band, was outed by the National Enquirer last
March, and he's happy to make clear that the lead single off his
latest album, "We Shall Be Free," introduced as "our first and only
attempt at a righteous or a gospel song," attacks any notion of
family values that excludes same-sex relataionships.

Though by now eclecticism is an overripe cliche, Brooks's
musical fusions signify creative courage in context, and it helps
that he can write. An advertising major turned composer who hit
Nashville in 1986 with mucho solo-acoustic time under his belt,
he's one of these guys you can tell just loves a great song.
Sometimes he rolls his own--the Midwestern swing of the debut-opening
"Not Counting You," or the cheerful live-and-let-die of
Ropin' the Wind's "Papa Loved Mama" ("Mama loved men/Mama's in the
graveyard/Papa's in the pen"), or, on the new The Chase, the
jauntily malleable "Mr. Right." But like any self-respecting
Nashville pro, he smokes o.p.'s--Dennis Robbins et al.'s rowdy
domestic-bliss fantasy "Two of a Kind, Workin' on a Full House," or
"Learning To Live Again," Stephanie Davis and Don Schlitz's wry
heart song about a divorced man's blind date, or the show-stopping
"Friends in Low Places," in which Dewayne Blackwell and Bud Lee
concoct the kind of chorus that convinced God to create Music Row:
"'Cause I've got friends in low places/Where the whiskey drowns and
the beer chases/My blues away/And I'll be okay/I'm not big on
social graces/Think I'll slip on down to the Oasis/Oh I've got
friends/In lo-o-ow places."

There are worse models than Elton John and Billy Joel, both of
whom have loads of great songs behind them. If Sonic Youth can try
and make something out of Kim Fowley, Brooks has the right to do
the same with Dan Fogelberg. And it's about time a man in a less
fantasy-driven subgenre than pure escape-pop spoke directly to
women. But Brooks's pop-eclectic reach isn't the all-things-to-all-people
pandering you might guess from the infotainment mags. He
really is country, and if you can imagine John and Joel kept in
check by a form less tolerant of conceptual flab than the pop/rock
they embrace so juicily, you have an inkling of why he might be
worth your attention. Often he's too untrammeled by the conventions
that impart an almost sonnetlike minimalism to Nashville product,
and he regularly goes too far--where most country albums founder on
filler, his overreach, although on Ropin' the Wind and the somewhat
moister The Chase the songcraft compensates for the excess. I could
do with fewer forces-of-nature metaphors and rodeo songs--lots of
times hot sex is more like gobbling lobster than hearing thunder,
and if you're going to get nostalgic about a country folkway,
better it be blood on the barroom floor. But he's onto something.
With assurances that the opinion expressed herein in no way represents
that of Mr. Brooks or his umpteen million fans, let me
put it this way--I don't give a fuck how Hank woulda done it. Hank
died way too young to suit me.

I already knew most of this when I drove down to Philly with
my wife and daughter. According to official Garthmyth, the singer's
life changed in 1989 when Sandy Brooks phoned to say her bags were
packed because he'd been messing around on her--"Women are so cool
and as different as snowflakes," explains the now-reformed Garth,
described by Sandy as "a very sexual person"--and he's talked about
quitting the road for the sake of his marriage, which recently
added an infant daughter. So I would have felt insincere taking the
trip alone. I wasn't surprised that my little girl was far from the
only under-12 in the 99 per cent full Spectrum. But I didn't
anticipate that kids would outnumber teenagers. It was date night
only for marrieds, and white marrieds at that--not counting
security, the one black person we saw appeared to be Nigerian. In
short, this was the suburban horde Garth-haters believe has stolen
the soul of country music. Even I never would have guessed how
they'd stoke the show.

Based on common sense, word of mouth, and his relatively
engaging stab at that tiredest of genres, the concert video, I
figured Garth's live strategy would be to dazzle folks with rock
moves, and from smoke machines and flash pots to ladder-climbing
and cable-swinging, the moves were there. But they were icing. It
was a given that the best-of format would accentuate both the
consistency and variety of his material, and that his band would
sound just as casually expert cranking it up as slowing it down. I
expected too that Brooks's fundamentally ordinary voice--the kind
of strong, flexible instrument journeymen die believing deserved
better--would crest again and again on enthusiasm and emotion
(though I was surprised at how many corny ones got me, especially
the solo acoustic "Unanswered Prayers," about how glad he is he
didn't land that high school honey). But more even than with most
arena acts, his audience was there not just for music but for each
other--for the hell-raising camaraderie this society normally
reserves for teens and singles. They were there to be worked and
served.

What's most appealing about Garth Brooks is that he's
simultaneously self-deprecating and voracious. His megastardom took
him by surprise, and though he craves the world's love, he doesn't
whine about it like Dan Fogelberg. The linchpin of the evening, and
proof of the thing ladies still have for this monogamous, balding
javelin thrower gone to pudge, was the gifts. As with Barry or
Julio, flowers predominated, dozens of dozens of them, but the
traditional nighties and house keys were nowhere to be seen;
instead there were cowboy hats, a Garth statuette, stuffed animals,
and, proudly displayed against the drum kit, baby clothes for
Taylor Mayne. A gofer-percussionist reduced the accumulation
periodically, but left a little more than Garth could comfortably
carry off at the end, so that the last we saw of him he was
literally staggering under the weight of his fans' largesse. Then
he came back and ripped into the Georgia Satellites' "Keep Your
Hands to Yourself."

I love honky tonk, and so does anybody who signs his set with
"Friends in Low Places." But though I treasure the style's
rebellious irreverence and bitter grit, and have little use for
country artists who quash them the way Vince Gill and Billy Ray
Cyrus do, they're not everything I care about; often, in fact,
they're suspended somewhere between memory and metaphor. I'm a
country fan because country is this century's most credible music
of domestic life. Early pop was pretty much coextensive with the
Victorian parlor, but as Tin Pan Alley evolved, it became either
too sophisticated for such a setting or too escapist to bear. At
its worst, suburban country is as icky as Barry Manilow or Michael
Bolton. But at its best, which is Garth Brooks, it cuts "Oh!
Susanna" with "Home Sweet Home" and mixes in some sex and suffering
so you know where you are. It doesn't capture the meaning of
existence any more than "Home Sweet Home" or "Oh! Susanna" did. But
it might just be good for what ails you.